I need to be able to sell the ROI on learning better. andHow can I better impress the value of eLearning across the organization?

And from his post, its clear he's not unsophisticated around it. Jay Cross will tell you to forget ROI, but I'm not so sure that you can dismiss the notion that you have to explain the business value of what you are doing ahead of it in order to sell it in the organization.

Really improve my "elevator pitch" to really convince sceptical behind-the-curve C-level executives that learning and development initiatives are actually going to grow their business, not send it into a Hindenburg-like crash and burn.

I really wonder if we can't help Michael out a bit by suggesting elevator pitches. There's no single right answer here, but seeing a few examples would be good. So ...

What do you say in your organization or to your clients that help explain the business value of eLearning?

Together, the five levels of technology integration and the five characteristics of meaningful learning environments create a matrix of 25 cells as illustrated below. Each cell is supported with video examples.

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Through the comments in Blog Learning (itself about learning through discussions on blogs) something hit me. Stephen Downes and Jay Cross would say this is a "no duh." But I had just never formulated it this way.

The comment was roughly that this blog (eLearningTechnology)

'has significantly more than the new learner "needs" to know. '

I would hope so!

But it also made me realize that someone might come to this blog thinking that it's purpose was to help them learn. And that the core objective might be to help a "new learner."

What's the learning objective associated with this blog? I hate to be so self serving, but the objective is really to help my personal learning. To a lesser extent the learning objective is to help other people learn.

In other words, the objective of this blog is not really to try to teach the readers a particular set of things. I hope that each post offers insights into a topic. It may spark some thoughts. Cause us to have a discussion.

But what do I post about? Well it's what I found interesting at that moment and what's meaningful to me that I think might also be meaningful and useful to you.

When you boil it down, there's learning on both sides - but the intent is first to support my learning (my personal learning objectives) - I don't really know you well enough to try to support your learning in any meaningful way. That's up to you. I hope my blog is part of that.

Of course, I may have just learned something myself - and maybe you did also. :)

I was just talking to someone who is regular reader of my blog and they claimed that I had never officially posted about the 90-9-1 Rule which is often referred to as the 1% Rule. Basically this rule tells us that in collaborative environments, e.g., discussion groups, wikis, etc. for every 100 people that sign up:

90 will lurk (read with no active participation)

9 will participate in a limited fashion (maybe rate or comment periodically)

1 will regularly post content

Of course, you can try to improve those percentages through:

Incentives or requirements (students must blog - it's graded)

Community cohesion

Focus (short time frame, limited topic)

Integrated as natural activity

and other adoption models. Still, be careful about overselling the amount of adoption.

And even with these efforts and while some environments differ in their participation rates, there is often a similar spread of participation which can be a big problem for the effectiveness of social solutions. Think about it:

To get 10 active content contributors, you need an audience of size 1,000.

Through my recent post: Social Conference Tools - Expect Poor Results I've received a bit of feedback on being such a pessimist (Dave Ferguson) and a great comment from Sue Waters that made me realize I needed to reframe the problem. I've been disappointed by the low participation rates and generally haven't seen that much value from these tools. But, most of the tools provided are aimed at trying to get everyone in the conference to use the tools.

Instead, if we believe the 90-9-1 Rule, then the real questions should be:

How can we create systems that when they are adopted by 1% of the population, we can provide value for the rest of the conference attendees and appropriately reward the 1%ers?

What can we provide for the 9%ers so they can make lightweight contributions that add value?

How can we effectively integrate the 90%ers so they get value from the 9%ers and the 1%ers?

I'm not sure I have answers here, but at least it gets me to think about the problem differently, and I'm more hopeful to find answers to these questions than trying to get greater participation among the entire conference audience.

One warning about this ... I'm not sure I can count every conference attendee as even a 90%er. Are they even going to enroll in the collaborative system? So, for a conference with 1,000 attendees, how many participants can you realistically expect. There will be anomalies (e.g., a Web 2.0 conference).

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Consider a social network for your conference. Although I remain skeptical about social networks, social networking is essential, and a few conferences have made brilliant use of them.

Give presenters a wiki page to spread out their session descriptions, post presentation commercials, and generate discussion through the commenting feature.

Give exhibitors a wiki page to spread out their description and to add special offers, schedules of booth presentations, and codes for door prizes.

Establish and CLEARLY advertise conference tags for bloggers and photographers.

Either aggregate photos and blog entries, or set up a conference page on Hitchhikr and link to that. (I’m considering doing a major rebuild of Hitchhikr.)

Generate a tag cloud that represents the conversation that is the conference.

If you have a social network or are connecting to profiles in some other way, ask attendees (physical & virtual) what’s on their radar, and post that, perhaps as a tag cloud.

Keep the conference web site going. Continue to maintain it. Post videos and audio podcasts of sessions. It’s good for your community, and good advertising for your conference.

A lot of these I think are really good ideas in theory and I'm constantly waiting for them to take off. Actually, I'm continually trying to figure out how to make conferences more effective use of time. And I've actually talked about this quite in posts such as:

I think there are some really good ideas in David's post and in some of these other posts. And, I've been happy to see various conferences about some of these practices - and I encourage them to keep it up.

However, ...

My basic feeling is that there's a fundamental flaw in all of these ideas that lead to poor results. The flaw is that it appears that people are quite willing to attend conferences without any up-front effort, back-end effort and probably the minimum effort during the conference. I posted how to Be an Insanely Great Professional Conference Attendee, but the requirement is to do some work to figure out what you really are trying to get out of the conference. It takes some time (but not a lot). Do attendees do this? It's rare.

In addition to the lack of effort, there's another big problem - lack of skills and experience. I've questioned before Conference Networking Tools - Do They Work?and the answer is that most of these tools are not very good. I've recently tried to use the one associated with the ASTD conference. It's not going to help me connect with people. I feel I'm relatively adept at networking via online tools, and have talked about how I use tools ahead of events Secret for Networking at Events - Prenetworking it's still really tough.

Based on what I've seen, I question whether it makes much sense for organizers to spend time on these things.

Let me try to summarize - these ideas are great, but they are social solutions that require participation and we don't get participation because of lack of effort and lack of skills.

Monday, April 21, 2008

Something I (probably too often) talk about is learning via a blog. It certainly is a great lens to have in viewing the world. It puts you into a learning mode. It naturally builds a network of learning cohorts. Simply put, it's a wonderful learning tool.

But what struck me recently is how great the feedback and interaction can be. In other words, I'm learning via blog comments and blog posts by other bloggers - likely much more than anyone reading the blog itself.

In some cases, I've set out with a specific information need and asking for input:

On the last of these, I was steered away from a particular approach to a session. This was great learning. Come to find out, people don't like those small break out sessions at most conferences either. I've seen them so often, I just assumed I should be doing them also. Blog learning!

In many cases, I post my thoughts and someone comes in to correct me or redirect my thinking. Take a look at:

I originally posted a thought. Then people came in to clarify it and redirect my thinking. I was originally thinking of a pretty limited case - looking up a phone number. How that's changed. And I may still use that. But consider how rich the problem is as described by a comment over the weekend:

I'm running through the same questions in regards to a certification desk of help desk technicians in my office. What is more valuable to the company - a technician that knows the answers, or a technician that knows how to look up the anwers. I'm coming to the point where I am leaning in both directions, and it's kind of making me angry internally for not being able to come to a conclusion.

One one hand - a person who knows the answer immediately sounds more professional (gives a sense of knowledge when speaking to the customer), and resolves problems more quickly.

On the other - a person who knows how to look something up is generally more capable of finding the correct answer, at the expense of a) time spent looking up the correct answer and b) looking like they do not know anything because they constantly need to go for help.

I have a similar issue when it comes down to people who 'understand' the material vs people who look up the answers. I can train almost anyone to fetch an answer from a database, but what is more valuable - a person who truly understands the material and understands why doing action A leads to result B, or person who looks up action A, gets result B, and then has to go back to the answer book to find next step C?

My superiors think that people who can answer scripted questions are more valuable to my industry, yet they consistently rely on people who understand the theory of problem resolution to actually fix anything important. I think that having 2 people who are able to think with logic and resolve issues correctly beats 5 people who can only read from a script.

How do I figure out what is the best situation and how do I convey this to managemnt.

Incredible insight. It's not nearly that simple as the phone number example. And I completely understand what Alan (the commenter) is saying here. And certainly, waiting for someone to look up the answer or finding out that they need to look it up can seem wrong. And not knowing why something is right worries me as well. Certainly, I would worry about hiring someone who always looked up answers and didn't seem to "know" anything.

Friday, April 18, 2008

I just pulled a report as part of an LMS Evaluation and saw an interesting pattern:

The pattern shows that the larger the audience the lower the satisfaction scores. My guess is that Learning Management Systems that target enterprise solutions and larger audiences will come out lower in LMS Satisfaction surveys.

As Chris pointed out in a comment and I talked about in Audio Narration vs. On-Screen Textyou should never have voice-over that's the same as the text on the page. That's just annoying and slows you down.

Other bad aspects included having choppy narration (people are not very forgiving around narration and other audio). Further, there was no audio control to let you know what's going on with the audio.

Later in the course, they used narration much better with a graphic. Still, this probably should not have been a course to point people to. Oh good, it looks like other suggestions are coming in.

I was contacted by Mike Hogan, the creator of Flashcard Friends. This is an interesting little application and might imply a few things around where things are going.

FlashCard Friends does a lot of what you'd expect in terms of creating Flash Cards for students. It's well designed and very easy to use. It also does some interesting things:

Allows users to categorize flash cards, mark them as being associated with particular text books, and then helps with the sharing of content. If you think about it, shouldn't the Flash Cards for most K-8 classes be similar?

You can copy an existing deck and easily modify.

They have automated definitions and translation to make it easy to create language flash cards.

You can add pictures or sounds to flashcards or with a Java applet, you can record sounds right into flashcards, which also is great for language learning.

For spelling, you can enter the word and the system has text-to-speech to create a sound that is the prompt that you then have to spell.

You can create tests (and the student can have practice tests) based on the flash card content.

In other words, my expectation is to have many easy to use, niche authoring tools that let's me create targeted interventions that I can compose together into an overall learning experience.

Social Learning Objects

One of the most powerful capabilities is how easy it is to grab existing content and modify it for your purposes. This is something we've wanted to do for a long time in learning, but it's always been hard. I would claim that within these more narrow, web-based authoring services, it will be much easier to share content. And there are lots of subjects where sharing makes sense.

About Me

Dr. Tony Karrer works as a part-time CTO for startups and midsize software companies - helping them get product out the door and turn around technology issues. He is considered one of the top technologists in eLearning and is known for working with numerous startups including being the original CTO for eHarmony for its first four years. Dr. Karrer taught Computer Science for eleven years. He has also worked on projects for many Fortune 500 companies including Credit
Suisse, Royal Bank of Canada, Citibank, Lexus, Microsoft, Nissan,
Universal, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Fidelity
Investments, Symbol Technologies and SHL Systemhouse. Dr. Karrer was
valedictorian at Loyola Marymount University, attended the University
of Southern California as a Tau Beta Pi fellow, one of the top 30
engineers in the nation, and received a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer
Science. He is a frequent speaker at industry and academic events.